The Speed Of Light

I wavered on the title of this story. The linked PDF is entitled ‘Somebody I used To Be’. It’s an old one, my second, and if I’m honest, I now view it as naive. Written in the first year of University, it fell out of me after that first bottle of wine. I thought I’d created something beautiful.

Of course, the narrator is me, and, with a few detail changes, the setting is somewhere I worked once. The young woman was real. I had an expectation of something being right with the universe if I got the girl.

After months of dancing around each other it didn’t work out. I felt faithless and heartbroken for years. I felt like I’d been judged by the order of things, and, more importantly, by the girl of my dreams as unfit for purpose.

I don’t feel like that anymore. Let me be clear, I know that my feelings had legitimacy within the context I was feeling them, but I now know that my expectations of how the order of things ‘should be’ was wrong.

I was concrete wrong to expect the love of someone. I was concrete wrong about the nature of respect between two individuals and I was concrete wrong to have eaten at the table of patriarchal expectation.

I still have no complete idea of what love is. As I understand it, it seems to be an agreement of terms between two people. With feelings. And Intimacy.

I frequently get things wrong. Part of being a writer is exploring one’s mind. As the cliche goes, writing is thinking.

Despite all of this, there is a small part of me, locked away, deep inside the machinery of my mind that finds appeal in this sort of story telling.

I hope that part of you isn’t so locked away.

You can find the full text below. The accompanying video is below that.

As always, this story is free. If you’d like to contribute a little something towards future work, follow this link to my Patreon.